Overclocked Performance

I mentioned earlier that I hit 4.6GHz on my 3960X sample, if you're curious about just how fast that makes the system have a look at this:

Overclocked: x264 HD Benchmark - 2nd pass - v3.03

The 3960X at 4.6GHz is almost twice as fast as the Core i7 2600K! The added performance does come at the expense of power consumption:

Overclocked Power Consumption - Load (x264 HD 3.03 2nd Pass)

Under load our overclocked testbed consumes 52% more power than a stock 3960X.

Power Consumption Final Words
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  • Tchamber - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link

    I think it's funny that so many people hated on AMD for making a 2B transistor count CPU that ran at 125watts, but no one says anything about Intel making 2.27B, and a CPU that runs HOTTER than FX's 125watts. Seems to me there are Intel fanboys too :) I supposed I'm one too, I'm running a Core i7 970.
  • joaopft - Sunday, December 4, 2011 - link

    These SB-E chips have been cobbled from the Xeon chips. Now Intel is cost-slashing on the enthusiast market? They must be insane! This core fused parts are an infamy to any enthusiast. Adding injury to infamy, SB-E's price/performance is below SB. Also, performance/watt numbers for this platform are not good at all. Intel is facing stiff competition from... Intel? No doubt it may be tempeded to kill the 2600K and the 2700K, when Ivy Bridge debuts.
  • danacee - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link

    I am really annoyed by the incredible short sightedness of Anands recent microarchitechture articles. The reviews here at time comes off as pretentious bile trying to forget the fact that the primary readers of this website are hardware enthusiast, not people in charge of the IT department budgets at illustrious companies!

    Would it really kill you to go into a bit more detail of X79 versus X58 era cpus and their per mhz scaling and power consumption? Because I can guarantee you NO ONE who owns an 1155 platform is giving x79 a second look, 90% of people upgrading to this platform are from the quad core X58, or even p35/x38/x48 era and you completely ignored us.

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